Helena Bonham Carter

• 1. Introduction

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  Helena Bonham Carter applied to King's College, Cambridge, and the college said no. She was rejected "because officials were afraid that she would leave mid-term to pursue an acting career." The fear was well founded. Born in 1966, she became a British actress with two Academy Award nominations, a BAFTA win and an International Emmy. She did it with no formal acting training. How does someone without drama school end up playing queens, witches and a jilted bride? Why did she resent the label that first made her famous? And what did a childhood inside an extraordinary family teach her about performing?

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• 2. Family Roots

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  H. H. Asquith, Prime Minister of Britain from 1908 to 1916, was Helena Bonham Carter's great-grandfather. His daughter Violet and her husband, Sir Maurice Bonham-Carter, were both British Liberal politicians. Sir Maurice descended from John Bonham Carter, a Member of Parliament for Portsmouth. Violet's brother Anthony Asquith directed films, including Carrington V.C. and The Importance of Being Earnest. Helena is a first cousin of the economist Adam Ridley and of the politician Jane Bonham Carter. Her distant relatives include the Hampshire cricketer Lothian Bonham Carter, his son Vice Admiral Sir Stuart Bonham Carter, and the pioneering nurse Florence Nightingale.

  During the Second World War, the Spanish diplomat Eduardo Propper de Callejón saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. He was her maternal grandfather. He was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations, and the Anti-Defamation League gave him its Courage to Care Award after his death. His own father was a Bohemian Jew. He later served as Minister-Counselor at the Spanish Embassy in Washington, D.C.

  Baroness Hélène Fould-Springer, the diplomat's wife, came from an upper-class Jewish family and worked as a painter. Her father was the French banker Baron Eugène Fould-Springer. Her mother, Marie-Cécile von Springer, was the daughter of the Austrian-born industrialist Baron Gustav von Springer. Hélène converted to Catholicism after the Second World War. Her sister Liliane de Rothschild, who lived from 1916 to 2003, married Baron Élie de Rothschild. Another sister, Therese, was the mother of the writer David Pryce-Jones. Hélène and Eduardo's daughter Elena would one day become a psychotherapist, and that choice mattered to her own daughter's work.

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• 3. A Home Under Strain

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  Helena Bonham Carter was born in London on the 26th of May 1966, with two older brothers, Edward and Thomas. Her father, Raymond Bonham Carter, was a merchant banker. During the 1960s he served in Washington, DC, as an alternate British director at the International Monetary Fund, representing the Bank of England. The family lived in Golders Green. She attended South Hampstead High School and took her A-levels at Westminster School.

  When Helena was five, her mother Elena suffered a serious nervous breakdown. Recovery took three years. Her own time in therapy pushed Elena to train as a psychotherapist. Helena now pays her mother to read scripts and give opinions on what drives each character.

  Five years after Elena recovered, Raymond was diagnosed with acoustic neuroma. Complications during the operation to remove the tumour led to a stroke. It left him half-paralysed and dependent on a wheelchair. With her brothers away at college, Helena stayed to help her mother cope. She later studied her father's movements and mannerisms for her part in The Theory of Flight. He died in January 2004. Long before then, a teenager had already found her own route into acting.

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• 4. Writing Her Way In

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  A national writing contest in 1979 paid for her first step toward acting. She spent the winnings on a place in the Spotlight directory for actors. At 16 she made her professional debut in a television commercial. In 1983 she took a minor part in the TV film A Pattern of Roses. In the early 1990s she studied clowning with the master clown Philippe Gaulier at his school, the École Philippe Gaulier.

  Lady Jane gave her a first lead in 1986, as Lady Jane Grey, and critics gave it mixed reviews. A Room with a View, adapted from E. M. Forster's 1908 novel, was filmed afterwards but reached audiences two months earlier, in 1985. As Lucy Honeychurch she had her breakthrough.

  Television followed. During the 1986-87 season of Miami Vice, she appeared as the love interest of Don Johnson. In 1987 she acted opposite Dirk Bogarde in The Vision, Stewart Granger in A Hazard of Hearts and John Gielgud in Getting It Right.

  Roger Ebert reported that she left Breaking the Waves because of "the character's painful psychic and physical exposure." She had been cast as Bess McNeill. Emily Watson took the part and earned an Academy Award nomination for it. Meanwhile, the costume dramas that kept arriving, many of them from Merchant Ivory, were hardening into a label she hated.

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• 5. Escaping the English Rose

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  "I looked, as someone said, like a bloated chipmunk," Bonham Carter has said of the image her early films gave her. Those films cast her as a "corset queen" and an "English rose", usually in stories set before or early in the 20th century. She was uncomfortable with both labels.

  In 1994 she showed up in a dream sequence in the second series of the British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous. She played Saffron, the daughter of Edina Monsoon, a part normally taken by Julia Sawalha. Throughout the series, characters kept remarking that Saffron looked like Bonham Carter.

  That same year, 1994, she met Kenneth Branagh while filming Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. They began an affair while he was still married to Emma Thompson. Thompson's career was soaring then, while Branagh was struggling with his first big-budget film. He and Thompson divorced in 1995. Bonham Carter and Branagh separated in 1999, after five years together. Thompson later said she held "no hard feelings" and called the affair "blood under the bridge." She added, "Helena and I made our peace years and years ago. She's a wonderful woman." All three later joined the Harry Potter series without sharing any scenes, though Thompson and Bonham Carter both appeared in Order of the Phoenix.

  She speaks French fluently, and in 1996 she starred in the French film Portraits chinois. That year she also played Olivia in Trevor Nunn's film of Twelfth Night. In 1997 she took the scheming Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove, which was widely praised abroad. It brought her first Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for Best Actress. Fight Club followed in 1999, with Bonham Carter as Marla Singer, and the role won her the 2000 Empire Award for Best British Actress. In 2001, on the set of Planet of the Apes, she would meet the American director Tim Burton.

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• 6. The Burton Years

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  In 2001, Bonham Carter began a relationship with Tim Burton, and he soon began casting her. Their films together include Big Fish in 2003, then Corpse Bride and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street came in 2007, Alice in Wonderland in 2010 and Dark Shadows in 2012.

  Mrs. Lovett, the amorous accomplice of Johnny Depp's Sweeney Todd, gave her one of her best-reviewed parts. The film adapted Stephen Sondheim's Broadway musical. It earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy. At the 2007 Evening Standard British Film Awards she won Best Actress for Sweeney Todd and Conversations With Other Women. Another Best Actress award came at the 2009 Empire Awards.

  In Alice in Wonderland, she played the Red Queen, a blend of the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen of Lewis Carroll's story. Her co-stars included Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Mia Wasikowska, Crispin Glover and her Harry Potter colleague Alan Rickman.

  Off screen, the couple lived in adjoining houses in Belsize Park, London. She owned one, Burton bought the other, and they joined the two. In 2006 they bought the Mill House in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. Her grandmother Violet had once leased it, and her great-grandfather Asquith had owned it. They have a son and a daughter. She told The Daily Telegraph about her struggles with infertility. Before her daughter was conceived, the couple tried for two years. They conceived naturally, though they had been considering in vitro fertilisation.

  On the 23rd of December 2014, the two announced they had "separated amicably" earlier that year. Of working together afterward, she said, "It might be easier to work together without being together anymore. He always only cast me with great embarrassment." She told Harper's Bazaar, "it's okay to be fragile," and said that after a separation one must take very small steps. In 2016 she reprised the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass.

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• 7. Queens, Witches and Voices

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  Anne Boleyn, in the ITV1 miniseries Henry VIII, was her second portrayal of an English queen. Her role was limited because she was pregnant with her first child during filming.

  In 2005 she voiced Lady Tottingham, a wealthy aristocratic spinster, in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, alongside Ralph Fiennes and Peter Sallis. On the 25th of December 2009, BBC One broadcast a 30-minute animated version of The Gruffalo, with Bonham Carter narrating as the mother squirrel.

  Bellatrix Lestrange, the evil witch of Harry Potter, was hers in the final four films, from 2007 to 2011. While shooting Order of the Phoenix, she accidentally perforated the eardrum of Matthew Lewis, who played Neville Longbottom, by pushing her wand into his ear canal. One review called her a "shining but underused talent." She also had a small but pivotal role in Terminator Salvation, as a personification of Skynet. In August 2008, four of her relatives died in a safari bus crash in South Africa. She received indefinite leave from that film and returned later to finish.

  Early in 2009, The Times named her among the top ten British actresses of all time, alongside Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn. In 2010 she played Queen Elizabeth in The King's Speech. She won her first BAFTA, for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, but lost the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress to Melissa Leo for The Fighter. In 2011, BAFTA LA gave her the Britannia Award for British Artist of the Year.

  Enid, a BBC Four film, cast her as the children's author Enid Blyton, with Matthew Macfadyen and Denis Lawson. It was the first time Blyton's life had been dramatised on screen. The role won her the 2010 International Emmy Award for Best Actress and her first British Academy Television Award nomination. That year she also starred with Freddie Highmore in Toast, the Nigel Slater biopic, filmed in the West Midlands. It had a gala at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival.

  In 2012 she played the jilted bride Miss Havisham in Mike Newell's Great Expectations, from the Charles Dickens novel. She was Madame Thénardier in Les Misérables that same year. She also appeared as a patient of Ben Kingsley's therapist in A Therapy, a short film Roman Polanski directed for Prada. In 2013 she played the peg-legged brothel madam Red Harrington in The Lone Ranger. She portrayed Elizabeth Taylor opposite Dominic West's Richard Burton in Burton & Taylor, which premiered at the 2013 Hamptons International Film Festival. In 2015 she was the Fairy Godmother in the live-action Cinderella.

  Princess Margaret, whom she knew in person through her uncle Mark, became her next queenly role. From 2019 to 2020 she played the older princess in The Crown, replacing Vanessa Kirby. The part earned her Primetime Emmy, Golden Globe, British Academy Television Award and Critics' Choice nominations, plus an Actor Award nomination. She was also part of the ensemble that won the Actor Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series in 2019 and 2020. In June 2018 she starred in Ocean's 8 with Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway and Sarah Paulson. In 2020 she played Eudoria Holmes in the Netflix film Enola Holmes. In 2024 she appeared as Margaret Gore in Four Letters of Love.

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• 8. Style and Causes

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  Vanity Fair put her on its 2010 Best-Dressed List, and Marc Jacobs chose her as the face of his Autumn/Winter 2011 campaign. British Vogue described her dark style in clothes and acting as "quirky and irreverent." She names Vivienne Westwood and Marie Antoinette as her chief style influences. In May 2006 she launched a fashion line, "The Pantaloonies", with the swimwear designer Samantha Sage. Their first collection, Bloomin' Bloomers, offered Victorian-style camisoles, mob caps and bloomers. Bonham Carter called their customised jeans "a kind of scrapbook on the bum."

  Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has shaped her taste since childhood. In 2021 she wrote a Harper's Bazaar article about it, saying, "As far back as I can remember, I've been a wannabe Alice." That May she also took viewers through the quirks of her own home in a commercial for the British furniture retailer Sofology.

  She sat on the 2006 Cannes Film Festival jury, which unanimously chose The Wind That Shakes the Barley as best film. In October 2008 she became the first patron of Action Duchenne, a national charity supporting families affected by Duchenne muscular dystrophy. In August 2014 she was one of 200 public figures who signed a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence. In 2016 she said she wanted the UK to stay in the European Union. In 2022 she became president of the London Library, its first woman in that post, having been a member since 1986.

  Since 2018 her partner has been the art historian Rye Dag Holmboe, who is 21 years younger. She told The Times in 2019, "Everybody ages at a different rate." She called him "an old soul in a young body" and added, "Women can be very powerful when they're older."

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